Forever stirs, forever lives, forever Kirby

It’s the end of forever in Jack Kirby’s final issue of the Forever People with issue # 11 (November, 1972) published 50 years ago today, 1 August, 1972. What did he want to leave us with as the Sixties and the Fourth World phased out together? As his forever youth, his counter-cultural hippie avatars, his disciples of peace and non-violence ended their time with us, just as their real-world counterparts began to vanish from public consciousness and their Movement along with them?

Jack Kirby didn’t want to leave of course. He was told to. In fateful April 1972¹, when he wrote and drew Forever People # 11, DC publisher Carmine Infantino ended the Fourth World. In his shock and anger Kirby poured himself out into his stories and characters, most notably in Forever People # 9 as editorial interference increased², as a form of therapy and indirect criticism of those who took his dream away.

In this issue the Forever People fight Devilance the Pursuer, an Apokoliptian menace, he is the opposite of deliverance, his mission is to splinter the Forever People and kill Beautiful Dreamer, Big Bear, Mark Moonrider, Vykin and Serifan.

Kirby made no secret of basing his comics characters on the Flower Power counter-cultural youth he saw around him. By August 1972, the Movement to End the War in Vietnam had come apart, riven by internal disagreements and undermined, split apart by the FBI and CIA with their COINTELPRO and CHAOS destabilisation programmes³. On 28 June, 1972, President Nixon announced no new draftees would go to Vietnam.⁴ Now only those who wanted to go, went, the fear factor for Sixties youth, that drove much of the defiance of authority and brought them together, was gone.

The Pursuer, like the Establishment in top gear, is relentless in his mission to wipe out the forever community, as if they had never been. Devilance pursues, traps, destroys. He confronts the Forever People and they are overmatched, only delivered by the timely intervention of the Police. Our youthful friends ‘phase out’, escaping underground only for Devilance to find them again.

He attacks boldly only to fooled by Beautiful Dreamer who casts a spell as he falls into molten lava: ‘Suddenly the ground beneath Devilance grows soft. Gives way…’But I didn’t see it. It wasn’t there.’ Yes it was, Devilance. The solid ground you walked on was an illusion.’

The cold, direct, military steel of the Establishment, in its hypocritical blindness, doesn’t see its bankrupt values, believes that nothing is wrong and that it can continue on as it always has. It sinks as the ground beneath it gives way, the weight of an unsustainable view of society and the heat and light of youthful fire takes it under. In a third encounter with Delivance, Serifan uses one of his cosmic cartridges to entomb Devilance in a faceless molten shell and the Apokoliptian demon falls face first into the sand, ‘…make way for the falling statue.’ Symbols of authority fall and lie inert.

In triumph, the Forever People are unsure. They cannot kill Devilance, their creed is non-violence. Their peaceful discipleship almost proves their undoing for Devilance has no scruples about taking life. Just as all looks lost, the Forever People seek the Source and join together with the Holy Spirit Mother Box to contact Infinity Man (IM) who has been roaming a cosmic prison, kept there by Darkseid. One Taaru! later, IM appears and battles Devilance which climaxes in both meeting their end.

And what of the Forever People? Kirby sends them to hippy heaven: ‘On the fair world beyond the barrier…the Forever People find peace.’ They know they will be there for ‘eternity’ on a world of ‘endless wonders.’ In a moving, closing vignette, as we see the characters for the last time, watching them walk into the eternal distance, Kirby sums up the Fourth World, the Sixties and the fragility of those forever times which we think will never end: ‘A moment stirs. A moment lives. A moment passes on….’

The last moments of Vykin, Serifan, Beautiful Dreamer, Mark Moonrider and Big Bear are together. No violence, no evil, no agency can break them or split them apart. They and their times have stirred us, they have lived with us and while their moment has passed on, their hope, their love, their kindness, their radical counter-cultural caring, remains with us. A beautiful forever moment, from our forever youth.

‘When you hear this sound a-comin'
Hear the drummer drumming
Won't you join together with the band
We don't move in any 'ticular direction
And we don't make no collections
Won't you join together with the band

…

Everybody join together
Won't you join together
Come on and join together with the band
We need to join together
Come on join together
Come on and join together with the band’

‘Join Together’ by the Who, number # 38 on the Billboard top 100 in the week of Forever People # 11’s release.

¹See Jack Kirby Collector # 80, pg. 114.

²See my commentary on Forever People # 9, ‘Scraps for the King’

³COINTELPRO and CHAOS were FBI and CIA programmes respectively, designed to discredit the counterculture and maintain the status quo.

⁴See Politico, this day in politics, 28 June, 1972 . ‘Early on, Nixon saw ending the draft as an effective political means to undermine the anti-Vietnam war movement. He believed that youths from affluent homes would lose interest in protesting the war once their own chance of having to fight there was gone. 

Research this issue -

Comics:

-According to Jack Kirby (Michael Hill, Lulu, 2021)

-Comics Journal # 134, February 1990 (Jack Kirby interview by Gary Groth)

-Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website

-The indispensable Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! (Jack Kirby Collector # 75: TwoMorrows)

-The equally indispensable Old Gods, New Gods (Jack Kirby Collector # 80: TwoMorrows)

Popular culture:

-Helter Skelter, the True Story of the Manson Murders (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, W.W. Norton, 1994)

The Games People Play (Eric Berne, Penguin, 1964)

-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007)

-The Vietnam War: The Definitive Illustrated History (Penguin Random House, 2017)

-Uncovering the Sixties (Abe Peck, Pantheon, 1985) 

-Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War (Max Hastings, William Collins, 2019)

Michael Mead is a 56-year-old New Zealand comic book collector, who likes to think he can do "contextual" commentary reviews of old comics, asking: "where does this story come from?", looking at the social, political, cultural times it came from, the state of the comics industry, the personal and creative journey of the writer or artist, the personal journey of the reader as a child and as an adult. 

As part of this, he is vain enough to think he can bring new insights into Kirby's Fourth World comics and so, on the 50th anniversary of publication of each issue of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, Forever People, New Gods and Mister Miracle, he will publish a contextual commentary. This is his 45th of 46 Fourth World commentaries (only one to go!). He may also do commentaries on the 1984 New Gods # 6, the graphic novel Hunger Dogs, the Absolute Jack Kirby volume two story and a final commentary/overview of the Fourth World. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake!